This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
and David Widger
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
I dedicate to you, my indulgent Critic and long-tried Friend, the workwhich owes its origin to your suggestion. Long since, you urged me toattempt a fiction which might borrow its characters from our ownRecords, and serve to illustrate some of those truths which History istoo often compelled to leave to the Tale-teller, the Dramatist, andthe Poet. Unquestionably, Fiction, when aspiring to something higherthan mere romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts. He whoemploys it worthily must, like a biographer, study the time and thecharacters he selects, with a minute and earnest diligence which thegeneral historian, whose range extends over centuries, can scarcely beexpected to bestow upon the things and the men of a single epoch. Hisdescriptions should fill up with colour and detail the cold outlinesof the rapid chronicler; and in spite of all that has been argued bypseudo-critics, the very fancy which urged and animated his themeshould necessarily tend to increase the reader's practical andfamiliar acquaintance with the habits, the motives, and the modes ofthought which constitute the true idiosyncrasy of an age. More thanall, to Fiction is permitted that liberal use of Analogical Hypothesiswhich is denied to History, and which, if sobered by research, andenlightened by that knowledge of mankind (without which Fiction canneither harm nor profit, for it becomes unreadable), tends to clear upmuch that were otherwise obscure, and to solve the disputes anddifficulties of contradictory evidence by the philosophy of the humanheart.
My own impression of the greatness of the labour to which you invitedme made me the more diffident of success, inasmuch as the field ofEnglish historical fiction had been so amply cultivated, not only bythe most brilliant of our many glorious Novelists, but by laterwriters of high and merited reputation. But however the annals of ourHistory have been exhausted by the industry of romance, the subjectyou finally pressed on my choice is unquestionably one which, whetherin the delineation of character, the expression of passion, or thesuggestion of historical truths, can hardly fail to direct theNovelist to paths wholly untrodden by his predecessors in the Land ofFiction.
Encouraged by you, I commenced my task; encouraged by you, I venture,on concluding it, to believe that, despite the partial adoption ofthat established compromise between the modern and the elder diction,which Sir Walter Scott so artistically improved from the more ruggedphraseology employed by Strutt, and which later writers have perhapssomewhat overhackneyed, I may yet have avoided all material trespassupon ground which others have already redeemed from the waste.Whatever the produce of the soil I have selected, I claim, at least,to have cleared it with my own labour, and ploughed it with my ownheifer.
The reign of Edward IV. is in itself suggestive of new considerationsand unexhausted interest to those who accurately regard it. Thencommenced the policy consummated by Henry VII.; then were broken upthe great elements of the old feudal order; a new Nobility was calledinto power, to aid the growing Middle Class in its struggles with theancient; and in the fate of the hero of the age, Richard Nevile, Earlof Warwick, popularly called the King-maker, "the greatest as well asthe last of those mighty Barons who formerly overawed the Crown,"[Hume adds, "and rendered the people incapable of civil government,"—a sentence which, perhaps, judges t